‘The way you say that! I don’t believe you care if I go or if I stay.’
‘Of course I care!’
‘Truly?’
‘Truly!’
‘Geo?’
‘Yes, Charley?’
‘I don’t think Jim would want me to leave you here alone.’
‘Then don’t leave me.’
‘No – I’m dead serious! You remember when you and I drove up to San Francisco? In September, it must have been, last year, just after you got back from England —’
‘Yes.’
‘Jim couldn’t come up with us, that day. I forget why. He flew up the next day and joined us. . . . Well, anyhow, just as you and I were getting into the car, Jim said something to me. Something I’ve never forgotten. . . . Did I ever tell you this?’
‘I don’t believe so.’ (She has told him at least six times; always when very drunk.)
‘He said to me, you two take care of each other.’
‘He did?’
‘Yes, he did. Those were his exact words. And, Geo, I believe he didn’t just mean, take care. He meant something more —’
‘What did he mean?’
‘That was less than two months, wasn’t it, before he left for Ohio. . . . I believe he said, take care, because he knew —’
Swaying a little, she regards him earnestly but dimly, as though she were peering up at him, fishlike, through all the liquor she has drunk. ‘Do you believe that, Geo?’
‘How can we tell what he knew, Charley? As for our taking care of each other, we can be certain he’d have wanted us to do that.’ George puts his hands on her shoulders. ‘So now let’s both tell each other to get some sleep, shall we?’
‘No, wait —’ She’s like a child, stalling off bedtime with questions. ‘Do you suppose that pub is still for sale?’
‘I expect so. . . . That’s an idea! Why don’t we buy it, Charley? What do you say? We could get drunk and earn money at the same time. ‘That’d be more fun than living with Nan .’
‘Oh, darling, how lovely! Do you suppose we really could buy it? No – you’re not serious, are you? I can see you aren’t. But don’t ever say you aren’t. Let’s make plans about it, like you and Jim used to. He’d like us to make plans, wouldn’t he?’
‘Sure, he would. . . . Good night, Charley.’
‘Good night, Geo, my love —’ As they embrace, she kisses him full on the mouth. And suddenly sticks her tongue right in. She has done this before, often. It’s one of those drunken longshots which just might, at least theoretically, once in ten thousand tries, throw a relationship right out of its orbit and send it whizzing off on another. Do women ever stop trying? No. But, because they never stop, they learn to be good losers. When, after a suitable pause, he begins to draw back, she doesn’t attempt to cling to him. And now she accepts his going with no more resistance. He kisses her on the forehead. She is like a child who has at last submitted to being tucked into her cot.
‘Sleep tight.’
George turns, swings open the house door, takes one stride and – OOPS! – very very nearly falls head first down the steps – all of them – oh, and unthinkably much farther – ten, fifty, one hundred million feet into the bottomless black night. Only his grip on the door handle saves him.
He turns groggily, with a punching heart, to grin back at Charlotte; but, luckily, she has wandered away off somewhere. She hasn’t seen him do this asinine thing. Which is truly providential because, if she had seen him, she would have insisted on his staying the night; which would have meant, well, at the very least, such a late breakfast that it would have been brunch; which would have meant more drinks; which would have meant siesta and supper, and more and more and more drinks to follow. . . . This has actually happened, before now.
But this time he has escaped. And now he closes the house door with the care of a burglar, sits himself down on the top step, takes a deep breath, and gives himself a calm stern talking-to. You are drunk. Oh, you stupid old thing, how dare you get so drunk? Well, now, listen: We are going to walk down those steps very slowly, and when we are at the bottom we are going straight home and upstairs and right into bed, without even brushing our teeth. All right, that’s understood? Now, here we go —
Well and good.
How to explain, then, that, with his foot actually on the bridge over the creek, George suddenly turns, chuckles to himself, and with the movement of a child wriggling free of a grown-up – old guardian Cortex – runs off down the road, laughing, toward the ocean?
As he trots out of Camphor Tree Lane on to Las Ondas, he sees the round green porthole lights of The Starboard Side, down on the corner of the ocean highway across from the beach, shining to welcome him.
The Starboard Side has been here since the earliest days of the colony. Its bar, formerly a lunch-counter, served the neighbours with their first post-prohibition beers; and the mirror behind it was sometimes honoured by the reflection of Tom Mix. But its finest hours came later. That summer of 1945! The War as good as over. The blackout no more than an excuse for keeping the lights out at a gangbang. A sign over the bar said, ‘In case of a direct hit, we close immediately’. Which was meant to be funny, of course. And yet, out across the bay, in deep water under the cliffs of Palos Verdes, lay a real Japanese submarine full of real dead Japanese, depth-bombed after they had sunk two of three ships in sight of the Californian coast.
You pushed aside the blackout curtain and elbowed your way through a jam-packed bar-crowd, scarcely able to breathe or see for smoke. Here, in the complete privacy of the din and the crowd, you and your pick-up yelled the preliminary sex-advances at each other. You could flirt but you couldn’t fight; there wasn’t even room to smack someone’s face. For that, you had to step outside. Oh, the bloody battles and the side-walk vomitings! The punches flying wide, the heads crashing backwards against the fenders of parked cars! Huge diesel-dikes slugging it out, grimmer far than the men. The siren-wailing arrival of the police; the sudden swoopings of the shore patrol. Girls dashing down from their apartments to drag some gorgeous endangered young drunk upstairs to safety and breakfast served next morning in bed like a miracle of joy. Hitch-hiking servicemen delayed at this corner for hours, nights, days; proceeding at last on their journeys with black eyes, crablice, clap, and only the dimmest memory of their hostess or host.
And then the War’s end and the mad spree of driving up and down the highway on the instantly derationed gas, shedding great black chunks of your recaps all the way to Malibu. And then the beach-months of 1946. The magic squalor of those hot nights, when the whole shore was alive with tongues of flame, the watch-fires of a vast naked barbarian tribe – each group or pair to itself and bothering no one, yet all a part of the life of the tribal encampment – swimming in the darkness, cooking fish, dancing to the radio, coupling without shame on the sand. George and Jim (who had just met) were out there among them evening after evening, yet not often enough to satisfy the sad fierce appetite of memory, as it looks back hungrily on that glorious Indian summer of lust.
The hitch-hiking servicemen are few now and mostly domesticated; going back and forth between the rocket-base and their homes and wives. Beach-fires are forbidden, except in designated picnic-areas where you must eat sitting up on benches at communal tables, and mustn’t screw at all. But, though so much of the glory has faded, nevertheless – thanks to the persecuted yet undying old gods of disorder – this last block of Las Ondas is still a bad neighbourhood. Respectable people avoid it instinctively. Realtors deplore it. Property values are low, here. The motels are new but cheaply stuck together and already slum-sordid; they cater to one-night stands. And, though the charcoal remnants of those barbarian orgy-fires have long since been ground into the sand, this stretch of the shore is still filthy with trash; high-school gangs still daub huge scandalous words on its beach-wall, and seashells are still less easy to find here than discarded rubbers.
The glory has faded, too, from The Starboard Side; only a true devotee like George can still detect even a last faint gleam of it. The place has been stripped of its dusty marine trophies and yellow group-photographs. Right after the New Year it’s to be what they dare to call redecorated; that’s to say, desecrated in readiness for next summer’s mob of blank-faced strangers. Already there is a new juke-box, and a new television fixed high up on the wall; so you can turn half right, rest your elbows on the bar and go into a cow-daze, watching it. This is what most of the customers are doing as George enters.
He makes unsteadily but purposefully for his favourite little table in the corner, from which the TV screen is invisible. At the table next to him, two other unhypnotized nonconformists, an elderly couple who belong to the last handful of surviving colonists, are practising their way of love; a mild quarrelsome alcoholism which makes it possible for them to live in a play-relationship, like children. You old bag, you old prick, you old bitch, you old bastard; rage without resentment, abuse without venom. This is how it will be for them, till the end. Let’s hope they will never be parted, but die in the same hour of the same night, in their beer-stained bed.
And now George’s eyes move along the bar; stop on a figure seated alone, at the end nearest the door. The young man isn’t watching the TV; indeed he is quite intent upon something he is writing on the back of an envelope. As he writes, he smiles to himself and rubs the side of his large nose with his forefinger. It is Kenny Potter.
At first, George doesn’t move; seems hardly to react at all. But then a slow intent smile parts his lips. He leans forward, watching Kenny with the delight of a naturalist who has identified a rosy finch out of the high sierras on a tree in a city park. After a minute he rises, crosses almost stealthily to the bar and slips on to the stool beside Kenny.
‘Hello, there,’ he says.
Kenny turns quickly, sees who it is, laughs loudly, crumples the envelope and tosses it over the bar into a trash container. ‘Hello, Sir.’
‘What did you do that for?’
‘Oh. Nothing.’
‘I disturbed you. You were writing.’
‘It was nothing. Only a poem.’
‘And now it’s lost to the world!’
‘I’ll remember it. Now I’ve written it down.’
‘Would you say it for me?’
This sends Kenny into convulsions of laughter. ‘It’s crazy. It’s —’ he gulps down his giggles. ‘It’s a – a haiku!’